Pinterest: a tool for churches?

I recently read a book titled “Pinfluence: the complete guide to marketing your business with Pinterest” written by Beth Hayden. For the past few weeks I had been playing with ideas in my head about whether or not I thought Pinterest would be a good tool for churches to use to enhance their content marketing strategies. When I saw this book I thought it would help me figure it out.

These interesting statistics about Pinterest were in the Introduction of the book:

Pinterest reached its 10 million user mark faster than any other social media site in history

In January 2012 Pinterest drove more traffic to websites and blogs than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined

Now, if your church is trying to reach people, it seems just from these statistics that this would be the way to do it. In Pinfluence, Hayden writes, “Done authentically and well, Pinterest marketing can be a powerful source of traffic to your website and can help you build an incredible community of followers and superfans who loyally support everything you do.” I know that for me personally I follow several blogs now that I would have never heard of in the first place if not for Pinterest.

Pinterest is another way to get people interested and talking about your church. Many companies will post contact from their blogs to Pinterest to funnel people back to their websites or blogs. Another thing companies will do is pin things that they believe their target market will be interested in.

I can see Pinterest working for a church if

1-they have a specific target audience they are trying to reach
2-the church has a certain personality they want affiliated with them
3-the church publishes a lot of their own original content

Otherwise, I am still torn on the applicable ways a church can use Pinterest.
What do you think? Would Pinterest be a good marketing tool for churches?

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